{"id":240433,"date":"2026-07-07T19:07:35","date_gmt":"2026-07-08T00:07:35","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2026\/07\/steering-light-in-a-flash-new-chip-redirects-light-beams-in-less-than-a-trillionth-of-a-second"},"modified":"2026-07-07T19:07:35","modified_gmt":"2026-07-08T00:07:35","slug":"steering-light-in-a-flash-new-chip-redirects-light-beams-in-less-than-a-trillionth-of-a-second","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2026\/07\/steering-light-in-a-flash-new-chip-redirects-light-beams-in-less-than-a-trillionth-of-a-second","title":{"rendered":"Steering light in a flash: New chip redirects light beams in less than a trillionth of a second"},"content":{"rendered":"

<\/a><\/p>\n

Light can carry enormous amounts of information at extreme speeds, making photonic technologies promising for the development of faster communications, more powerful computing systems and more sensitive sensors. But for light to be useful for these purposes, engineers need to be able to control where it goes and redirect it quickly. A new device built by Caltech researchers uses a beam of light to steer another to a different angle in just 74 femtoseconds (74 quadrillionths of a second). That\u2019s about the time it takes light to travel the width of a human hair.<\/p>\n

\u201cSteering light with light<\/a> is very challenging because light typically interacts very weakly with matter. Using optical metasurfaces (ultrathin carefully nanoengineered sheets), we can up the interaction strength to make this possible with much higher efficiency,\u201d says Harry Atwater, the Howard Hughes Professor of Applied Physics and Materials Science and the Otis Booth Leadership Chair of the Division of Engineering and Applied Science at Caltech.<\/p>\n

The team describes the work in a paper published<\/a> in the journal Nature Nanotechnology<\/i>. The paper\u2019s lead author, Claudio Hail, completed the work as a postdoctoral scholar in Atwater\u2019s lab at Caltech and is now an assistant professor of mechanical engineering at UC Berkeley.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Light can carry enormous amounts of information at extreme speeds, making photonic technologies promising for the development of faster communications, more powerful computing systems and more sensitive sensors. But for light to be useful for these purposes, engineers need to be able to control where it goes and redirect it quickly. A new device built [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":662,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1523,38],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-240433","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-computing","category-engineering"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/240433","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/662"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=240433"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/240433\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=240433"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=240433"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=240433"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}